Code example looks wrong? null is passed as updater to a. As far as I understand, what is passed as callback to a is supposed to be the updater instead (especially since the ctor errors on both val and updater being null). Also, would be more clear what the difference and usage of updater and callback are if they were called something like calcVal and onValChanged respectively

We use null objects at work, and as another person said they are a safety feature. Here’s how they work: they are wrappers around another type. They provide the same interface as the wrapped type. They store one global instance of the wrapped type, default initialized, in a memory page marked read-only.

Here’s why they are considered a safety feature (note: most of this is specific to c++).

Suppose you have a collection, and you want to write a function that finds an item in the collection. Find can fail, of course. What do you return in that case? Reasonable options would be a null pointer, or std::nullopt. Having find return a std::optional would be perfect, because that’s the exact use case for it. You either found the item or you did not.

Now, the problem is that in most cases you don’t want to copy the item that was found in the collection when you return it, so you want to return a pointer or a reference. Well, std::optional<T&> is illegal. After all, an optional reference has the same semantics as a pointer, no? This means your find function cannot return an optional, it has to return a pointer with the special sentinel value of nullptr meaning “not found”.

But returning nullptr is dangerous, because if you forget to check the return value and you accidentally dereference it you invoke undefined behavior which in this case will usually crash the program.

Here’s where the null object comes in. You make find just return a reference. If the item is not found, you return a reference to the null object of the relevant type. Because the null object always exists, it’s not UB to access it. And because it is default initialized, trying to get a value from it will just give you the default value for that data member.

Basically it’s a pattern to avoid crashing if tou forget to check for nullptr

Meh. Been developing professionally with C++ for 10 years at this point. I’m one of the weird people that kinda likes C++ and its pragmatism despite all its warts.

I’d like C++ better if it didn’t have inheritance. There are better solutions to model interfaces, and without inheritance people can’t write class hierarchies that are 10 levels deep with a different set of virtual functions overridden (and new virtual functions added) at each level.

And yes, that is not hypothetical. Real codebases in the real world shipping working products do that, and it’s about as nice as you can imagine.

You do have a terminology mismatch. In C++, an abstract class is a class with at least one pure virtual method.

Such classes cannot be instantiated, so they are useful only as base classes.

An interface is more of a concept than a thing.

Sure you can say that Iterable is an interface that provides the Next() and Prev() methods and you can say that Array is an Iterable because it inherits from Iterable (and then you override those methods to do the correct thing), and that’s one way to implement an interface in C++.

But you can also say that Iterable<T> is a class template that provides a Next() and Prev() methods that call the methods of the same name on the type that they wrap (CRTP aka static polymorphism).

Or you can say that an algorithm that scans a collection T forward requires the collection to have a Next() method by calling Next() on it.

And I can think of at least 2 other ways to define an interface that isn’t using abstract classes.

And even if using abstract classes, inheriting from them is definitely the least flexible way to use them to define an interface, because it doesn’t allow one to do something like mocking functionality in tests, because it’s not possible to redefine the class to be tested to inherit from the test interface implementation with mocked functionality, so one still needs something to the effect of dependency injection anyway.

So yeah, abstract class is very different from inheritance, and it’s also very different from interface, even though it relates to both.

Copyleft licenses are explicitly leveraging copyright laws.

So if the output of an “AI” is not subject to copyright, and the input material is also not subject to copyright, I can train a model so it outputs a byte-for-byte copy of, say, a marvel movie, and said copy is copyright free, yes?

Use uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock, not AdBlock Plus, not any other crapware. Looking at AdBlock website they have a blurb about only keeping anonymised data and never selling it and yada yada yada, because it goes against their company ethics.

Company ethics. AdBlock is owned by a company. A for-profit entity. How do you think they make their money? Either they sell the data they have gathered (why does an ad blocking extension need to gather user data?) or they have agreements with ad companies.

Compare the websites of AdBlock and uBlock Origin. The first thing on uBlock Origin website is a link to the publicly available source code. That’s trustworthy. AdBlock’s website has a handpicked list of 5 star reviews.

TL; DR: please switch to uBlock Origin and ditch AdBlock, they (the company behind AdBlock) likely have agreements with advertisers (including Google and YouTube) to make money. Your data is being harvested by using AdBlock. You cannot look at the code for AdBlock. AdBlock is not trustworthy.

If by vim you mean neovim

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd(“fileType”, {
    group = file_type_group,
    pattern = “make”,
    command = “setlocal ts=4 sts=4 sw=4 noexpandtab”,
})

Slap this in your config, done

They are yeah, but in that scenario you would also not have a window decoration with a close button, so I assumed the OP meant maximized :P

Reread the OP. They say:

not on GNOME, because you have a panel at the top

And

when usign GTK apps on those [non-GNOME] desktops

So you would not “access the controls above the app”, because having controls above the app is not covered by this scenario.

The scenario is:

1. You don’t have a top panel
2. You have a maximized GTK app

Which makes the close button be in the corner of the screen, but without actually extending to it.

On topic: never knew this was a problem, guess I got spoiled by the Qt environment

I thought mint was switching to a debian base but it looks like I am mistaken. While LMDE exists, it’s still not the default.

Got the feeling that’s probably gonna change soonish, we’ll see.

I remember playing lots of sims 2 as a kid. Could not play sims 3 due to not having a pc that could run it, and I found sims 4 extremely disappointing.

Been keeping an eye on Life by You and Paralives for modern takes at the genre.

I wonder if EA will try to innovate with sims 5 and if they’ll try to optimize the unbelievable loading times (talking about sims 4 here) due to the competition or if they hope to coast on reputation alone.

I thought Life by You was trying to fill that gap.

With both that and Sims 5 (edit: oh an Paralives of course, was forgetting about that) on the horizon will this new studio be able to find its space in the market?

Guess more competition is always good, hopefully it doesn’t flop immediately.

I don’t know about color profile data, but I can vouch for the EDID potentially being totally wrong sometimes on even basic data like physical size or even logical size (number of pixels).

As for the why, I don’t know, but following Occam’s razor I would guess that it’s cheaper when you just don’t care and leave it as somebody else’s problem.

Since my previous example didn’t really have return value, I am changing it slightly. So if I’m reading your suggestion of “rewriting that in 3 lines and a single nested scope followed by a single return”, I think you mean it like this?

int retval = 0;

// precondition checks:
if (!p1) retval = -ERROR1;
if (p2) retval = -ERROR2;
if (!p3 && p4) retval = -ERROR3;

// business logic:
if (p1 && !p2 && (p3 || !p4))
{
    retval = 42;
}

// or perhaps would you prefer the business logic check be like this?
if (retval != -ERROR1 && retval != -ERROR2 && retval != -ERROR3)
{
    retval = 42;
}

// or perhaps you'd split the business logic predicate like this? (Assuming the predicates only have a value of 0 or 1)
int ok = p1;
ok &= !p2;
ok &= p3 || !p4;
if (ok)
{
    retval = 42;
}

return retval;

as opposed to this?

// precondition checks:
if(!p1) return -ERROR1;
if(p2) return -ERROR2;
if(!p3 && p4) return -ERROR3;

// business logic:
return 42;

Using a retval has the exact problem that you want to avoid: at the point where we do return retval, we have no idea how retval was manipulated, or if it was set multiple times by different branches. It’s mutable state inside the function, so any line from when the variable is defined to when return retval is hit must now be examined to know why retval has the value that it has.

Not to mention that the business logic then needs to be guarded with some predicate, because we can’t early return. And if you need to add another precondition check, you need to add another (but inverted) predicate to the business logic check.

You also mentioned resource leaks, and I find that a more compelling argument for having only a single return. Readability and understandability (both of which directly correlate to maintainability) are undeniably better with early returns. But if you hit an early return after you have allocated resources, you have a resource leak.

Still, there are better solutions to the resource leak problem than to clobber your functions into an unreadable mess. Here’s a couple options I can think of.

1. Don’t: allow early returns only before allocating resources via a code standard. Allows many of the benfits of early returns, but could be confusing due to using both early returns and a retval in the business logic
2. If your language supports it, use RAII
3. If your language supports it, use defer
4. You can always write a cleanup function

Example of option 1

// precondition checks
if(!p1) return -ERROR1;
if(p2) return -ERROR2;
if(!p3 && p4) return -ERROR3;

void* pResource = allocResource();
int retval = 0;

// ...
// some business logic, no return allowed
// ...

freeResource(pResource);
return retval; // no leaks

Example of option 2

// same precondition checks with early returns, won't repeat them for brevity

auto Resource = allocResource();

// ...
// some business logic, return allowed, the destructor of Resource will be called when it goes out of scope, freeing the resources. No leaks
// ...

return 42;

Example of option 3

// precondition checks

void* pResource = allocResource();
defer freeResource(pResource);

// ...
// some business logic, return allowed, deferred statements will be executed before return. No leaks
// ...

return 42;

Example of option 4

int freeAndReturn(void* pResource, const int retval)
{
    freeResource(pResource);
    return retval;
}

int doWork()
{
    // precondition checks

    void* pResource = allocResource();

    // ...
    // some business logic, return allowed only in the same form as the following line
    // ...

    return freeAndReturn(pResource, 42);
}

Bad advice. Early return is way easier to parse and comprehend.

if (p1)
{
    if(!p2)
    {
        if(p3 || !p4)
        {
            *pOut = 10;
        }
    }
}

vs

if(!p1) return;
if(p2) return;
if(!p3 && p4) return;

*pOut = 10;

Early out makes the error conditions explicit, which is what one is interested in 90% of the time. After the last if you know that all of the above conditions are false, so you don’t need to keep them in your head.

And this is just a silly example with 3 predicates, imagine how a full function with lots of state looks. You would need to keep the entire decision tree in your head at all times. That’s the opposite of maintainable.

Does Israel have a free press?

The “or later” is optional, the FSF specifically doesn’t have the power to update the terms of every GPL-licensed software because the wrote the clause in such a way that they don’t.

If I give you software licensed under the GPL3, and a GPL3.1 comes out, it doesn’t apply to your copy of the software. Likewise the copyright holder of the work is also not forced to relicense their software under the GPL3.1. And even if they did, copies of the software distributed under the GPL3 would still be licensed under the GPL3.

The “or later” clause simply means that if I received a copy of a GPL3 software, I can redistribute it under the GPL3.1 if I so wish (where “I” in the previous sentence is everyone with a copy of the work, as the GPL gives everyone with a copy redistribution rights)

Maybe Eidos would love to get another Deus Ex out there but there’s no publisher interest

You know, they could just… Say this, and placate everyone. I’m honestly sick and tired of companies in general, and game companies specifically, being afforded this stupid level of opaqueness.

If you were to talk to someone that would exclusively stonewall you, you’d be quick to stop talking to this person. When it’s game companies though, everyone bends over backwards to try to find justifications for their behavior on their behalf.

TAA has become so common because its’s “free”. Temporal data is required by DLSS and FSR, so if you are implementing those technologies you already have the necessary data to implement TAA, making it a no brainier to include.

Dude what about four?